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As with any modern technology, security is an important consideration in implementation and use. The XMPP specification and derived extensions have had security in mind from the very start for both the user, and the host.

Users very often want to have their past chats preserved so they can search and refer to them at a later time. Almost all modern chat clients offer the functionality to store chat history locally. This works well if they only use the IM system from a single place and device. However, nowadays almost everyone has multiple devices like a desktop computer, mobile phone, tablet and even web clients. They want to access all their services from all devices, including IM and chat which is impossible if the history is stored client side since every device archives data separately. If a web chat application is used storing that information client side is not even possible.

The best solution is to store chat archive server side and allow all user's devices to access that archive. Message archiving component allows to store user's chat history on the server in a single repository, search and retrieve past conversations whenever necessary. Tigase offers full support for Message Archiving extension. It automatically stores all messages going from or to a user and its inner workings are fully transparent.

Database sharding supported out of the box to allow data and load distribution

What we particularly like about our implementation is that it is a component which can be deployed either inside the main Tigase server or as an external addition. It can even be deployed onto multiple external servers to off-load heavy database processing and also users' data can be distributed to multiple databases. This makes our solution a perfect for large and very busy deployments.